Coming Soon from Mayfair Games

Mayfair Games announced a whole slew of new releases and exciting reprints for 2017 recently.

In Bärenpark, 2-4 players compete to build their own bear parks – including other animals might have just been too much – with enclosures, animal houses, and shops by combining polyomino tiles onto a grid, aiming to finish their parks the best and quickest for the most points. This game comes from the mind of Phil Walker-Harding, of recent Imhotep fame, and the wonderful art of Klemens Franz. All your questions about what it takes to house a 2,000 lb. Kodiak bear will be answered this year.

Iron Dragon, for 2-6 players, is a reprint of the 1994 classic crayon rails pick-up and deliver train game, designed by Darwin Bromley and Tom Wham. Players build tracks across the fantasy-steampunk world of Darwinina by drawing them onto the board, traveling across the map to deliver goods and earn money. Iron Dragon features random events, different regions that vary players’ progress, foremen who discount passage over particular terrain, and forest creatures attempting to put a wrench into players’ plans. Excited by drawing on the board in all those new-fangled legacy games? At least this time it’s erasable.

Glass Road, for 1-4 players, is also returning from Mayfair Games this year. By designer Uwe Rosenberg, Players travel to the Bavarian Forest of the 18th century to produce glass by gathering and managing resources via the game’s resource conversion wheel. The central mechanism of the game, however, is the simultaneous action selection of specialists that grant the players their actions. Selecting a specialist no one else has picked grants greater abilities, while matching specialists with another allows a player to take more actions. Read your opponents and take advantage of their successes, just like the Bavarian glassmakers of old.

Atlantis is another reprint from Mayfair Games and designed by Leo Colovini for 2-4 players. In this game, each player is trying to get their faction of people to the mainland before Atlantis sinks, collecting the most artifacts along the way. The game consists primarily of players playing cards to build bridges, but water gaps are created at the same time, increasing the journey’s danger and difficulty. Can you save your people better than everyone else?

Mayfair Games will also be releasing Food Chain, a trick-taking type game with a twist. In Food Chain, 3-6 players try to outguess each other in simultaneous card play, aiming to play animals higher up in the food chain to claim the other player’s cards as points for the end of the game. This game is not about eating one another, just subtly asserting your dominance over the other creatures of the forest. How like life.

A new party game has been announced by Mayfair Games, Party Bites. This game, for 3-5 players, enjoys a bit of metagaming, pitting players in the roles of partygoers vying for snacks and drinks in a light push-your-luck game that supposedly takes 10-15 minutes to play. The push-your-luck comes in the form of flipping cards over and taking a kind of snack, passing the rest to the next player. Flipping too much can cause a spill, however, and the player to lose all of their snacks collected this turn. Sounds very similar to a real party.

Run Bunny Run is a 2-5 player game that also cuts a little close to the bone, in which a band of wolves are trying to capture a bunny. One player plays the clever bunny navigating the wolves’s strategic card laying and movement programming maneuvers in an attempt to reach the safety of his home. In the real world, the bunny would probably stand no chance, but in this game, he only has victory points to lose. Musn’t be late!

Mayfair Games also announced a brand new expansion for the popular Lords of Vegas, entitled Lords of Vegas: Underworld. The expansion includes 56 cards with new game effects and the ability to score victory points off the board.

Even with all of these exciting announcements of new games and old, Mayfair is not stopping there in 2017. Look for these additional releases later this year as well: